Ray Solomonoff

Ray Solomonoff (1926-2009) was the originator (in 1964) of algorithmic information theory. Solomonoff's work preceded Kolmogorov (1965), from whom we have the term Kolmogorov complexity, shortly before the work of the then teenage G.J. Chaitin (1966). But, unlike the slightly later Kolmogorov and Chaitin, Solomonoff also saw the relevance of this new area to statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and prediction - and coined the term algorithmic probability (ALP).

Given a body of data, the algorithmic probability distribution behind Solomonoff prediction is obtained by doing a posterior-weighted averaging of the outputs of all available computable theories - with the prior probabilities of theories depending (monotonically decreasingly) upon the lengths of their encodings on the chosen Universal Turing Machine (UTM).

In the year in which Ray Solomonoff would have turned 85 and some months before the year in which Alan Turing (upon whose Universal Turing Machines much of Solomonoff's work is based) would have turned 100, this conference is timed for late 2011. It also follows 15 years after the Information, Statistics and Induction in Science (ISIS) conference in 1996 and also held in Melbourne, Australia - whose invited speakers included Ray Solomonoff, (Turing Award winner and fellow artificial intelligence pioneer) Marvin Minsky, Jorma Rissanen (of MDL) and (prominent machine learning researcher) J. Ross Quinlan.